Revision as of 15:59, 6 May 2013

ConnMan is an alternative to NetworkManager and Wicd and was created by Intel and the Moblin project for use with embedded devices. ConnMan is designed to be light on resources making it ideal for netbooks, and other mobile devices. It is modular in design takes advandage of the dbus API and provides proper abstraction on top of wpa_supplicant. ConnMan currently has plugins available for:

It is Typically used for Wireless networking and being plugin based it is extremely fast at resolving connections. After setup You may wish to check for yourself with systemd-analyze blame To see the difference in performance VS other Network Managers.

Using ConnMan

First enable and start the connman service with systemctl.

# systemctl enable connman.service
# systemctl start connman.service

Desktop Clients/Applets

Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, ConnMan only has two working panel applets and a dmenu client.To control ConnMan in other window managers / desktop environments, one can use the test scripts included in the source package.

You should now be connected to the network. Check using ip a or connmanctl state.

Settings

Settings and profiles are automatically created for networks the user connects to often. They contain feilds for the passphrase, essid and other information. Profile settings are stored in directories under /var/lib/connman/ by their service name. To view all network profiles do:

Note: VPN settings can be found in /var/lib/connman-vpn/

# cat /var/lib/connman/*/settings

Hardware

Various hardware interfaces are referred to as Technologies by connmanctl. To interact with them one must refer to the technology by type.
Technologies can be toggled On/Off with:
$ connmanctl enable technology_type And $ connmanctl disable technology_type

Example:

This will toggle wifi off
$ connmanctl disable wifi

Note: The field Type = tech_name provides the technology type used with connmanctl commands